Expanding the definition of ‘us’

A RABBI, a Jew who eats bacon and a white dude from Arkansas walk into a bar … Not really. But they all did share the same message with me recently, a message that I think our community really needs to hear right now.

The white dude from Arkansas was Bill Clinton. He gave a speech at the Bloomberg Forum, in which he called the audience to action, saying that “the most important thing is whether you believe that social strength, economic performance, and political power flow from division or multiplication, from subtraction or addition”.

“You’re all here,” he said to an audience of business and political leaders, “because, in one way or another, you intuitively know this. You believe that multiplication is a superior strategy to division.”

He was talking, of course, of the political and social issues of our times. The world feels a little scary right now. Clinton argued that many of the world’s greatest troubles right now are the result of what he labelled “separatist tribalism”.

The rabbi made a similar case for unity. He talked about the importance of bending our perspective to help us see others’ points of view.

To walk in other people’s shoes, and be willing to look up from the same thought processes that may have guided us to this point, and instead look at issues and ideas through another person’s eyes, even those we fundamentally disagree with.

The Jew who eats bacon used these words to describe someone who he is personally having a difficult time with. “I try and always respect that, in his mind, he thinks he is doing the right thing.”

Three wildly different people. One talking at the geopolitical level, one at the community level and one at a personal level of the same idea about being willing to seek cooperation over division.

In the last few months, I’ve been saddened to see our community divided. On Facebook and in these very pages, not to mention, no doubt, at many a family dinner table, it seems that our community is divided on a range of political and social issues.

It’s not just the marriage equality campaign. I’ve witnessed some terrible verballing of individuals in our community lately online on a whole range of issues.

I don’t for one moment say we shouldn’t have these debates. We should. We must in fact. It’s how we learn from each other. Curiosity, questioning, debate, even argument can be positive.

As Pierre Abelard, a French philosopher put it, “the beginning of wisdom comes in doubting; from doubting we come to the question. And from the question we may come upon the truth”.

Our tradition is founded on the principles of argument among rabbis. What is the Mishnah but a compilation of legal opinions and debates? But purposeful and productive debate is based on strong fact-based content and sound argument; not vilification or ridicule, hate speech or plain nastiness dressed up in sarcasm.

Just because we know someone’s family or history or where they live or go to school does not make it any more okay to vilify or damage someone’s reputation than if we did so to a stranger on the street. Of any community, ours should have well and truly learned the lesson of the damage that hate speech can do.

In Yuval Harari’s book, Sapiens, he describes how humans came to rule the earth not through physical strength or the size of our brains.

We evolved to become the leaders through our capacity to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.

The white dude from Arkansas said something similar. “Successful cooperation”, he said, depends on “first believing that we can and must every day expand the definition of ‘us’ [and] shrink the definition of ‘them’.”

And I think this applies equally to international relations as it does to the Jews of Australia.

FIONA GRINWALD

Fiona Grinwald is a government policy hack, writer and the founder of 2lookup, a platform of positive shared connection seeking to help people proactively build resilience to live a positive life, and cope after adversity. www.2lookup.com.au.